SWS19
Dozens of events in many countries, covering all inhabited continents of the world, took place during September 2019.
After Andrew Stuck pioneered Sound Walk Sunday in 2017, he teamed up, at the end of 2018, with Geert Vermeire, the convenor of Made of Walking, writer, curator and a locative multi-media expert with a focus on the environment, travelling and living in between Europe and Brazil, and with Babak Fakhamzadeh, an award winning locative app developer, based in Sao Paulo in Brazil. We reprised Sound Walk Sunday in 2019 as a global festival, in a joint organisational structure of the Museum of Walking and Made of Walking, with key institutional partners in Brazil, Australia, Greece, Spain, Germany and Poland.
Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library hosted, in the run up to this event, our ‘Explore with Sound Walks’ symposium, a half day event in June 2019, which saw presentations from experts from Poland, Greece, Spain, Brazil and the UK. By this time, we realised that Sound Walk Sunday was evolving into something else, Sound Walk September, becoming not only a showcase for innovation, but also a valued community-building resource, bringing practitioners together, many of whom are remotely working creatives who had previously perhaps felt isolated.
The results:
- 80+ live events.
- 40+ countries.
- 50+ walking pieces made in 2019 eligible for the Sound Walk September Award 2019.
- 2 joint winners, 4 honourable mentions.
Download the media pack.
Experience a walking piece
The listing of walking pieces which Andrew started on the Museum of Walking website has grown into our directory of walking pieces.
Key contributors and supporters
- Marcin Barski founder of IPD (Soundscape Institute of Poland) – Poland.
- Hamish Sewell, founder of Soundtrails – Australia.
- NG Bristow – Goldsmith’s, University College London UK
- LISTEN, – a summer of sound Frome – co-ordinator Mel Day, curator Helen Ottaway from ArtMusic – UK.
Additional thanks
- Department of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Western Macedonia (Florina and Lesbos, Greece). Organiser of Walking Arts Encounters-Conference Prespes 2019.
- hearing places – an Australian online umbrella for creative projects which unite sound and place.
- Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library
- The many artists and creatives who have submitted their work.
Recording the Unseen; recreating a lost city through audio narratives
John Beauchamp's soundwalk Unseen is set in Warsaw, and recalls hidden stories and lost sounds from places wiped off the map. John's piece is available on Josh Kopeček's Echoes, and received a honourable mention at Sound Walk September 2019. Here, John talks about his work.
The mycelial web, developed hundreds of millions of years ago, now on your cellphone
David Merleau was one of the two winners in last year’s Sound Walk September. His piece, Forest Talk Radio, set in Ontario, Canada, weaves together folktales and forest science to produce a radio comedy experience delivered right to your smartphone. Here, David talks about his work. For decades I have been fascinated, some could say obsessed,
Touched by sound in Munich
Last year, for Sound Walk September 2019, Mathis Nitschke received an honourable mention for his piece Inside Mphil. Here’s Mathis in his own words. I’m a music composer working regularly with orchestras, a fascinating and thrilling experience, especially when you can be really close to the musicians: the notion “touched by sound” actually turns into
The fight to preserve green spaces in an urbanised world
At last year's Sound Walk September, the majority of submissions came from Europe. But, not all. Yonatan Collier received an honourable mention for his work Taman Tugu: Interference/Resistance, set in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Here's Yonatan, discussing his work.
Sound Walk September 2019 winners
For the Sound Walk September Awards 2019, over 60 contributions were accepted, connected to over 80 events worldwide. Accepted pieces were sound walks, or walking pieces, created in 2019. A huge variety of formats, approaches and subjects from a wide range of creative disciplines, including arts, heritage and history, health and wellbeing, silence and architecture, social
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